The many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries, from
Ancient Egypt (which invented them) to twentieth-century America (which
put them in Hollywood epics).
Nearly every empire worthy of the name--from ancient Rome to the United
States--has sought an Egyptian obelisk to place in the center of a
ceremonial space. Obelisks--giant standing stones, invented in Ancient
Egypt as sacred objects--serve no practical purpose. For much of their
history their inscriptions, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, were completely
inscrutable. Yet over the centuries dozens of obelisks have made the
voyage from Egypt to Rome, Constantinople, and Florence; to Paris,
London, and New York. New obelisks and even obelisk-shaped buildings
rose as well--the Washington Monument being a noted example. Obelisks,
everyone seems to sense, connote some very special sort of power. This
beautifully illustrated book traces the fate and many meanings of
obelisks across nearly forty centuries--what they meant to the
Egyptians, and how other cultures have borrowed, interpreted,
understood, and misunderstood them through the years. In each culture
obelisks have taken on new meanings and associations. To the Egyptians,
the obelisk was the symbol of a pharaoh's right to rule and connection
to the divine. In ancient Rome, obelisks were the embodiment of Rome's
coming of age as an empire. To nineteenth-century New Yorkers, the
obelisk in Central Park stood for their country's rejection of the
trappings of empire just as it was itself beginning to acquire imperial
power. And to a twentieth-century reader of Freud, the obelisk had
anatomical and psychological connotations. The history of obelisks is a
story of technical achievement, imperial conquest, Christian piety and
triumphalism, egotism, scholarly brilliance, political hubris, bigoted
nationalism, democratic self-assurance, Modernist austerity, and
Hollywood kitsch--in short, the story of Western civilization.
